The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  Such applause I have never heard. Not for me, not for Gaby, not for any of us who danced or sang or whistled upon the stage. Many in the audience stood, prompting Ducks to shout, “Down in front!” For no sooner had the applause begun than another picture appeared on the sheet, a street scene this time, with tall buildings and throngs of people.

  “Herald Square,” Mother breathed in awe.

  “Have you been there, Mother?” I asked. “Where is it?”

  “New York,” she said, enraptured, her eyes not moving from the image.

  This was followed by another dancing girl and then a boat upon the sea, with waves so rough and high that many in the front seats shouted that they’d get wet. I watched in studied wonder, confounded at how I could be seeing such things. How could those women dance in the air? How could waves be captured and thrown onto a sheet?

  Another spell of darkness, another burst of applause. Then two large faces—a man with a mustache and a portly woman—appeared in front of us. “Who are they?” I asked. Their faces were so large I could see the man wink and the woman’s dimples as she turned.

  “That’s May Irwin and John Rice,” Ducks said, a sense of wonderment in his voice. “It’s from the play—”

  Something seemed to occur to him all at once. “Florrie,” he commanded. “Cover your eyes.”

  I did as I was told, just as I heard Mother shriek. I couldn’t help myself. I raised my index finger like the blade of a scissors and saw the man on the screen reach over and kiss the woman. In enormous detail. Repeated over and over and over again. The audience howled its approval.

  Mother stole a glance at me. “Florence!” she reprimanded me. I closed my fingers.

  Finally, there was a prolonged darkness. The audience began cheering, assuming the show was over. But instead, one last image flickered upon the sheet: a train. It moved along at a brisk pace from some distance away. I was fascinated. It seemed as if the train were coming closer to us, as if it really lurked there behind the sheet, in the dark shadows of the stage. A sudden, horrifying stillness descended over the audience. I pushed back in my seat. The train was there, surging forward on unseen tracks. Although the only sound was the whirring above, I could hear its engine, its bellowing horn, its clatter on the tracks. I could smell the smoke, taste the ash of the burning coal. I’d ridden many trains, watched still more. And this one was bearing right down upon us!

  The audience screamed. People stood. A few ran into the aisles. Mother grabbed me, attempted to shield me with her body. The train barreled down and was about to come crashing into all our laps—

  And suddenly the lights came back on and the whirring noise ceased.

  There was stunned silence for several seconds, then anxious, embarrassed laughter. Ducks said, “Well, I’ll be an old fool.” Mother wiped her brow.

  “The train, Ducks,” I asked him breathlessly. “Where did it go?”

  He hoisted me up on his shoulders as the crowd stood and cheered, stamping their feet. The important men who’d come to see Edison’s latest marvel threw their high silk hats into the air. “That’s where the train went.” Ducks laughed, turning around and pointing up at the strange black machine on the second balcony. “It went back inside the Vitascope!”

  I stared up into the cold black eye of the projector. Such a strange-looking thing, nothing anyone would recognize today. Lots of wires, as I recall—an odd shape, like a sewing machine. But it transfixed me. I sat there on Ducks’s shoulders, the cheers of the crowd ringing in my ears, and wished with all my might that I, too, might someday go inside the Vitascope.

  The Present

  Her first instinct was not to trust him, this handsome journalist, and usually she trusts her instincts. Ever since her experience in Hartford, Sister Jean found reporters to be shifty and unreliable, out for their own ends, willing to play sincere for the sake of a story.

  But she likes him. Maybe because he wasn’t afraid to be himself in front of her. People sometimes tend to be edgy around nuns. She can’t abide that.

  Of course, Richard Sheehan also looks an awful lot like Victor, and that could be the reason she melted: the same dark eyes, the same straight black hair thinning just a little along the hairline, the same sweep of wide shoulders across a strong back. It was just a year last week since Victor died. Jean sees him almost every day—in the eyes of strangers like Richard Sheehan.

  “Who is Flo?” Richard is asking her now.

  Jean smiles. “Come along. I’ll introduce you.”

  She figures that Flo will know for sure whether or not Richard can be trusted. Flo can smell a schemer from the next town before he even turns his wiles on her. “That’s because I’ve been one myself,” she’s told Jean. “Among other things.”

  It was as if after living all this time Flo had learned how to really see: right through the skin, behind the eyes, into the soul.

  “You’ve been wounded,” she told Jean the day they met, Jean’s first day at St. Mary’s.

  Wounded. It had been just weeks since the terrible events in Hartford. Flo had seen the pain in Jean’s eyes—the only one who had.

  “I may have a few scars,” Jean admitted, “but they’ve healed.”

  “If a wound leaves a scar,” Flo told her, “that’s not being fully healed.”

  Jean had nodded; she’d felt the same way many times. Flo and she were friends from that point on.

  In those difficult first months, Jean would sometimes wake late at night and not remember where she was. The transition had happened so fast. She’d sit up in bed and try to make out her surroundings or comprehend the stillness. Where were the sirens, the sounds of traffic? Jean would get up and wander through the corridors as the wind whistled in the eaves of the old manor. She’d check with the sisters on night duty, look in on sleeping residents.

  Flo was always awake during these times. “Come in,” she’d say. “Sit down and we’ll talk away the night.” So they would, about everything. Church teaching, soap operas, modern technology, whiskey versus gin, the meaning of family. “You come on down here whenever you like,” Flo told her. “I hardly ever sleep.”

  Jean walks now with Richard down the corridor, past more rooms with old women sitting blank eyed in their chairs. One sings about the old gray mare who ain’t what she used to be. There’s a sudden whiff of urine, a passing cloud of disinfectant. Then they turn into a large common room, where the light is so bright Jean notices Richard blinking his eyes several times in an effort to get used to it.

  “This is what we call our day room,” Jean tells him.

  The room is a cacophony of color. Pink and purple artificial leather chairs are scattered throughout. Half a dozen residents mill about wearing bright clothes: green stretch pants or blowsy blue robes. Each wall in the room is adorned with theater posters like the one in Stanley Soboleski’s room, their faded reds and golds preserved under glass. Jean smiles to herself when she sees Richard’s surprise at the room after the starkness of the corridor and the somber elegance of the foyer. There’s a crucifix here, as there is in every room, but the walls here are painted a vital yellow instead of the drab off-white present everywhere else. And it’s not the austere visage of the Pope that stares down at them from the walls of the day room, but the faces of tightrope walkers, grinning clowns, and actresses with thick black contours around their eyes.

  “Well,” Richard Sheehan says, his lips stretching into a broad smile, “it’s not your father’s Catholic rest home.”

  “Flo was the decorator,” Jean explains.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. She and I went on a brightening campaign right after I first got here, bringing color back to most of the rooms.”

  “How old is she?” Richard asks.

  “She’ll be a hundred and seven in a few months,” Jean tells him, proud as a stage mother.

  “A hundred and seven!” Richard looks as if he’s hit the jackpot.

  “More and more people are living past th
e century mark these days, Mr. Sheehan,” Jean says. “It’s really not so surprising anymore. They’re the fastest-growing segment of the population, believe it or not.”

  “Where is she?” Richard asks.

  “Right here,” comes a voice. Jean turns. Flo has spotted them from across the room and overheard their conversation. She’s wearing a flowing paisley caftan; her white hair is pulled back in an enormous red satin bow. There’s a small hump to her back, one of the few significant signs of her advanced age. Otherwise, she could pass for eighty. She’s barefoot, with her toenails painted hot pink, and she’s smoking a cigarette from a long black holder. She’s just finished passing out boxes of Girl Scout cookies to the other people in the room.

  “Flo,” says Jean. “I want you to meet someone.”

  “You allow smoking in here?” Richard asks.

  Jean just smiles. “This is our designated smoking section. Flo insisted she wasn’t going to give up all earthly vices when she came to live here. I learned rather quickly after I arrived that some rules were made to be broken.”

  Flo has moved closer to them. She walks slowly, with a little hunch, but there’s a steadiness that belies her age. She eyes Richard cagily.

  “Who is this young man?” she asks Jean.

  Her voice is worn by years of too much smoke and laughter, but it’s a good voice: deep and throaty, honest and real. She lifts the cigarette to her lips in a dramatic gesture, inhaling for punctuation. Jean suppresses a smile. Flo likes to perform for new faces. Her hand is knotty and discolored in places, but her nails are painted hot pink like her toes, and she wears a large gold medallion ring on her forefinger.

  “Flo, this is Richard Sheehan. He’s a writer.”

  Flo’s eyes regard him with even greater suspicion. “A writer? I didn’t think we liked writers, Jeannie.”

  “I think you’ll like what he’s writing about.”

  “I’d be terribly grateful if you’d just give me a few minutes of your time,” Richard says.

  Flo turns to the old folks eating their Girl Scout cookies. “Henrietta, come here, dear,” she calls. A chubby woman wearing a blue-and-red polka-dot dress hurries over as best she can. “Collect the money when you pass out the boxes,” Flo tells her. “Remember: no bucks, no box.”

  “Yes, Flo,” Henrietta says, turning back to scold an old man who is attempting to pilfer a box from the pile on the table.

  “What happened to the honor system?” Jean asks. “I thought we agreed people could just leave their money on the table.”

  Flo raises an eyebrow. “We got screwed last time,” she says. “Somebody in this wing didn’t put in his fair share.”

  “You’re selling Girl Scout cookies?” Richard asks.

  Flo smirks. “He’s a bright boy, Jeannie. Can’t keep anything from these reporters.”

  Richard’s eyes twinkle. “Just wondering if you’d made the girls’ version of Eagle Scout yet,” he says, returning Flo’s smirk.

  Oh, boy, Jean thinks. He’s attempting to spar with Flo.

  “No, not yet,” Flo says, her eyes taking hold of Richard’s and not letting go. “But I have made it with a few Eagle Scouts in my day, however.”

  Richard looks suitably chastised—or amused.

  “Flo’s in charge of selling the cookies in this wing,” Jean explains. “It’s for the daughter of our cook.”

  Flo sighs. “Gertie’s a sweetheart of a woman, except she can’t cook worth beans.” She smiles. “No, I take that back. Beans, she can cook.” She returns her attention to Richard. “So who the hell d’ya write for?”

  “The New York Times,” he tells her.

  “Weeeell,” Flo says, leaning back and grinning wide, revealing perfectly aligned false teeth. “Aren’t we big-time?” She takes a long drag on her cigarette, then exhales the smoke over her shoulder, away from the man’s face. “Never could figure out what was so special about being a writer. It’s just putting one word after another.”

  Jean smiles. Flo’s giving him the grand treatment. The tough-old-broad routine. The young nun supposes she should really make this easier on Mr. Sheehan, but Flo’s just so much fun to watch in action. Why deny her a little pleasure?

  “Sit down,” Flo commands. Richard looks around, takes a seat on a pink chair. “So what’re you writing about?”

  He seems prepared for the question. “About life. As seen by those who’ve lived the longest. What living does to someone. How they see the world after—”

  “How old are you?”

  “Me?”

  “You see me talking to anyone else?”

  He smiles up at his inquisitor. “I’m thirty-four,” he tells her.

  “Where were you born?”

  “Massachusetts.”

  “Your parents still living?”

  “Just my mother.”

  “And how old is she?”

  “Sixty-one.”

  “Where in Massachusetts?” Jean interjects.

  Flo cuts her off. “Jeannie, I’m conducting this interview if you please.”

  “Sorry, Flo.”

  “Actually,” Richard says, “I thought I was—”

  “Not until I find out about you.” Flo folds her arms across her chest. “What else have you written?”

  “Magazine articles mostly. I used to be on staff at the Times until I went freelance a few years ago. Oh, and I’ve tried my hand at a couple of screenplays.”

  “Screenplays. Not films. So I take it they’re unproduced.”

  He smiles sheepishly. “That’s correct.”

  “They used to call them scenarios in my day. They any good?”

  “I think so.”

  “So why haven’t they been made?”

  “Too much sex, I guess,” Richard says, and he winks at her.

  For a second, Flo looks surprised. Surprised that he’d say such a thing in front of an old lady and a nun. Then she laughs. Puts her hands on her hips, leans back, and laughs. Jean smiles right along with her. She knows now that Flo will like Richard Sheehan as much as she’s sure he’s already begun liking her.

  “Too much sex?” Flo guffaws. “I didn’t think that was possible these days.”

  Richard watches the ancient creature in front of him. Her every gesture, her every expression is exaggerated, as if she were performing on a stage. Her mouth is painted scarlet over and above her upper lip to create a beestung look—the look popular nearly a century ago. Her agility is as smooth as a sixty-year-old’s, her wit as spunky as a teenager’s. He is, in a word, entranced.

  She’s taken the seat opposite him. Her gaze remains locked to his. She smooths out her caftan across her knees, sitting on the edge of her chair like a coquette. She even bats her eyelashes—her real lashes still, Richard observes, long and thick—and places her hand over her heart.

  “Do you have movie connections, Mr. Sheehan?” she asks.

  “Well, my brother is a filmmaker.”

  “Really? And what films has he made?”

  “Oh, just some shorts. Independent stuff. One got him some attention, but that was almost ten years ago. It was on the nuclear-arms race. It was about this family who survives a nuclear-bomb attack, or at least, they think they do—”

  “A family?” asks Sister Jean. “Not One Chance, One World?”

  Richard nods. “Yes. That’s the one. You know it?”

  “A wonderful film,” the young nun says, and for the first time, Richard sees some genuine surprise and admiration in her face. “I was involved in the peace movement then. We showed that film many times.”

  “Yeah. Ben made it while he was at NYU Film School. He’s never really been able to match its success.”

  “Who was the star?” Flo asks.

  Richard smiles. “The bomb.”

  “No picture’s worth your nickel without a star,” Flo says, raising her chin just a bit.

  “Well, Ben has used his girlfriend—Anita—in a number of pictures since then,” Richard sa
ys. “She’s the woman I came up here with.”

  Sister Jean leans in toward Flo. “Stanley Soboleski’s niece.”

  “Oh.” Flo draws on her cigarette, then lets out the smoke. “Heard he went over to the other side today.”

  “Flo,” Sister Jean says incredulously. “How do you find out things?”

  “Just keep your ear to the ground, right, Mr. Reporter?” She winks at Richard.

  “That’s right,” he says.

  “Ear to the ground and to the wall,” Flo says. She squints her eyes over at Richard. “Let’s see. You married? No. You’re a homosexual.”

  Richard laughs out loud. He feels his face redden. For all his militancy, for all of the ACT UP demos he’s participated in, he feels suddenly exposed and embarrassed, as if Flo had just guessed the brand of his underwear.

  “Flo,” Sister Jean scolds mildly.

  “Aren’t I right?” the old woman asks.

  “Yes,” Richard admits. “Yes, you’re right.”

  “See, Jean? They admit it these days. You can talk about it openly now.” She grins. “Anita Loos was one of the first to observe it. ‘Men no longer prefer blondes,’ she said. ‘Nowadays gentlemen more and more prefer gentlemen.’” Flo chuckles. “And it’s about time, I say. Never could understand why it was such a big dark secret. Spent most of my life with homosexuals.”

  “Well, I keep no secrets,” Richard assures her.

  Flo smiles shrewdly at him. “Come now, Mr. Sheehan. We all keep one or two.”

  He smiles. “Might I ask you a few questions now?”

  “A few,” Flo says.

  “Are you really a hundred and six?”

  “No, I’m actually twenty-seven. I’ve just lived hard.”

  He laughs.

  “Let’s just say I’m not as young as my teeth or as old as my tongue,” she tells him.

  “Flo will be a hundred and seven next January,” Jean explains.